the net raiders

Perhaps I could of found a more compelling title to this debate that is starting to gain momentum among the IGN base, but I prefer to go tongue and check with a topic as serious as World of Warcraft.

So what exactly is this debate, and why should I care? — I’ll try and break it down as simple as possible before I start throwing my bias around the room. Ever since The Wrath of the Lich King expansion came out for World of Warcraft, I have been conscious of sites that tally up your armor rating/character rating. Call them what you will, I think the verbiage is still being fleshed out. And with the advent of the WoW – Armory, people could log in and view the builds of any character in the game. When I say build, I mean anything you would ever want to know about this character is out there and open for anyone to view. We are talking trade-skills, stats, gear, spec … I could go on forever, but you get the idea.

Now, I hadn’t given this much of a second thought. Okay, I never gave this a second thought. This seemed like a nice novelty. A place to post your bragging rights. WoW is the number one game in the world. And here is your number one character for the world to see. And the greatest thing about this is that Blizzard exports almost ALL of their information in XML format. Giving 3rd party sites a chance to create their own feed into the armory and create a search engine for any character in the game. Then accumulate all of the characters armor, and turn it into an “armor rating.” Truly we are in the dawn of a new age in gaming. Impressive to say the least. This isn’t your uncle’s D&D in the basement anymore.

Also, I used this to take a peak at some of the higher end Arena players and figure out what I would need to gain an edge. So if I can see everyone’s characters, then it would only make sense to have the brightest and best players with the brightest and best gear to come along for the 10-man/25-man dungeon raids. And if you wanted to come along for one of these uber lewt runs, it only makes sense to send the raid leader your armor rating right?

Wait what? This is creating quite a heated debate in the WoW scene. More for the casual gamer, less for the hardcore. But none the less I’m conflicted. So I am going to break it down the only way I know best.

The good.
With a system like this, I could essentially create a baseline requirement for anyone to come along in my raid. If people are showing up with full sets of green armor, then it’s going to show in their rating. Which is a good thing for the people trying to put the raid together. I can turn them down because their damage/healing output just won’t be up to par. If everyone isn’t up to par, then our chance of success is quickly plummeting down to zero. First Naxx, then Uldar… have provided some of the hardest boss encounters WoW has to offer, and definitely the hardest the MMO scene has ever had. Gone are the days of the “spank and tank.” Zerging a boss is impossible in an instance. And quite frankly, everyone is going to be a little pissed if they spent all this time getting to the boss, just to be rolled because the healer could dish out the numbers needed to keep the tank alive. I don’t want to waste my time and I want assurance that we are going to be able to make it to the end, dominate the boss, and then reap the sweet sweet rewards of an epic purple. This is a good thing.

The Bad.
But wait? This is all well and good for the raid leader, but what about the guy trying to get into the raid. I know that raid members were always at the mercy of the raid leader, but now there is an actual number assigned to you that can be discriminated upon. And more importantly, what about the casual player that makes it to 80? A raid leader could essentially request that all raid members have most, if not all, epic pieces of equipment before they embark on said dungeon (….to get better epics). After all they want a successful raid right? How would a casual player, who doesn’t have any epic gear, go about getting epic gear if they aren’t allowed into a group that goes hunting for epic gear? This makes my head hurt, but see the problem here? It’s not like this can be hidden, because there are now mods made for on-the-fly rating check ups. So if a casual player wants to embark on being able to raid with the big boys, they need to trade-skill until they yield epics, they need to do daily quests and gain enough rep so that they can buy epics or they can PvP in the battlegrounds (for several months) until they can yield epics. All of these things… take forever. Believe me, I’ve done it. Just to have a shot at getting something better than what you have right now. But wait, it get’s worse.

The Ugly.
I think the most important part of all, is that the armor doesn’t dictate the quality of the person behind the computer screen. Ever hear the expression, “The man makes the money, the money doesn’t make the man?” I can think of a handful of times, with very little effort, when I have grouped with some of the most elitist, geared out, assholes WoW ever had to offer, and get rolled because their army of one mentality screwed everyone royally (obviously it wasn’t there fault. It was something we were doing wrong… right?). I feel like a good portion of people in the higher end tiers, were able to get where they were because they just grinded it out for, literally, years. They didn’t have to be good, they just had to be there when the tier 1 Shadowcraft armor dropped, and get a good roll. They got a lucky roll, got better gear, got accepted into more raids because of their numbers, which allowed them to move up to the next tier of armor.

I also recall getting chastised when I played my priest because my healing numbers were low. When in actuality I was pounding the keys. But that I spent a better part of my time preventing damage with magic shields and HoT’s. The leader didn’t care, or even notice, if I was preventing damage, all he wanted was some sweet-spot-top-tier-platinum-edition-high-end healing. Toss strategy overboard, you are here to pound a single key and produce some numbers.

So do the numbers mean they are qualified for the role? Given in all of my 26 years of age, I have had a handful of jobs. Real life jobs. And a couple quite respectable ones in the IT and Advertising field. And it is safe to say that I have worked with, at certain points in my life, people who had me convinced they were clinically diagnosed morons. Ah but they had great resumes! They had worked the years, been there for the dot-com boom and had everything they needed to prove that they knew what they were doing. But these same people (most of them, by and large in my opinion, were responsible for the dot-com bust) were completely clueless to their jobs and the environment around them. I hated working with them, and often I could do their job better than they could do theirs. And often that was the case! But alas, I didn’t have the years of experience. I didn’t have the real life epic lewt. Seeing what they were like, and how they worked without a resume to dictate their positive qualities… makes me hope to never have to work with them again.

And who is to say that this “raid leader,” is qualified to lead the team? See, when I was a teenager, I worked at place called Roger Wilco Super Market. And the General Manager was the son in law of the very, very old owner… and had a degree in Marine Biology. What? Are you serious?! The man was bad at… well… everything. If there was an epic fail in the grocery business, he was the embodiment of it. And worst of all he had no idea what he was doing. He was the son of the owner, that is exactly how he got the job. He married the owner’s daughter…. I remember once he had me go through the salad dressing isle and shake up all the bottles so the liquid didn’t look sediment. Obviously when this guy was in Marine Biology school they forgot to tell him that oil and water don’t mix. But there I was, shaking bottles of salad dressing for two hours before I had to mop up pickled pigs feet in the next isle over. Wow, I digress….but the proof is in the pudding because Roger Wilco Super Market is since long gone. By and large because of idiots who had no idea what they were doing, how to crunch the numbers, and how to fully utilize a team. But I think the point is very much the same. While the armor ratings will help the probability of a successful raid, it doesn’t mean it will be. You have a guy with a degree, but we could not know what the heck he is doing.

World of Warcraft is a great game, but over the last couple of years, it has started to destroy it’s own credibility… and dignity as an MMO, by making the game a giant time sink for armor. It seems like everything else they have worked on has ended up failing, or cruising along on life support waiting for someone to pull the plug. The trade system is brutal at best with exclusive recepies that require large amounts of reputation or lucky rolls in dungeons. And the PvP battlegrounds offer nothing more than a repetitive honor point crunch with no penalties. And Wintergrasp… well let’s not get started on how broken that is. But once you hit max level, that is really all you have left to do…. go get a sword that is marginally better than the sword you have now. And once you get that sword, there is a new sword out that is even better. The hunt for the next best item is as strong and as addictive as ever. Sure everyone can get the gear to be good enough to be in a raid, but that amount of time is astronomical for the casual gamer and very probable for the kid with nothing better to do. It rewards the person who plays every minute of every day for the last five years reguardless of whether they are good or not. And quite frankly I don’t have that kind of time anymore since there is this massive wall of “have to’s” I am required to climb over to enjoy the rest of the game. I consider myself a good player. I push the right keys at the right time. But without the armor essentially I suck.

And this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I feel that maybe I would like the game more if there weren’t so many requirements and atunements and base level gear to be considered to run through the dungeons. Perhaps Blizzard could lighten up on these raids. Making them more about the group experience, and less about gestapo type regiments just to enjoy a game we are paying monthly for. Maybe make it easier. Admit that they hit the ceiling and make the game more about the rich content Warcraft is based on. And less about the heartless “mater of fact” number crunching that the game has become. Why is Leeroy Jenkin’s so popular? Because sometimes this quest for better items can turn into ridiculous amounts of work.

I know my theories are not bullet proof and this debate really leaves each to their own. And the great thing about a game is that if you disagree with any level of the mechanics you can put it down and play something else. Which is totally fine with me. But when you get demands for armor ratings just to enjoy the end game content, I can’t help but wonder if something really great about this massive, all inclusive game is getting sucked dry.

You shouldn’t HAVE to do anything in a game. That’s work. Work is not fun, and we should do all we can to avoid it when we don’t have to.
Games are supposed to be fun. And MMO’s are supposed to included everyone. That’s what drew me to them in the first place.

*EDIT: It seems Pallydog over at IGN vault and myself happen to be on the same wave length. She posted using the same good, bad or ugly structure to beg the question to the vault viewers